It’s very hard to see value to farming in a single player game unless there’s a big push towards the construction of substantial NPC settlements. I personally don’t even keep NPC’s with me on the road, much less a settlement, as I find them incredibly inconvenient, so I can’t speak to that game experience personally.
This mirrors reality. A single individual in a world mostly devoid of other people would in fact have a much easier time supporting themselves through hunting and foraging than they would through farming - farming is a capital intensive endeavor (on the individual scale), that only makes sense if you’re trying to support a larger community that would otherwise exhaust foraging opportunities within their effective territory.
The game currently reflects this - though foraging is really VERY productive once your survival gets up a little bit, so you’d need a decent size community before you’d be able to exhaust foraging resources in the current model. Now, very long seasons would make it somewhat easier to exhaust forage (assuming bushes only refresh once each season) - not for an individual who can simply move to new foraging zones, but for a static community, a 90 day season would probably see them exhausting the local forests of all forage before too long, and at that point they’d need to start farming to make up the difference.
This does depend somewhat on how animal spawns work. At the moment animal spawns seem to be pretty plentiful and a couple moose and deer properly butchered generate a LOT of food (as they should).
Now of course, the spawn density of forage bushes could be reduced, or the success rate of foraging could be reduced to make farming more attractive by comparison or to force more frequent scavenger migration for those with no interest in farming.
